If
you are in education, you are in the business of brain development. If
you are leading a modern corporation, you need to know how brains
work.
--John Medina, Brain
Rules, 2008

In addition to the isolating conditions of teachers' work, and the ways
schools are maladaptive technologically, new computer-driven
technologies (PET scans, MRIS) are revolutionizing the way we
understand learning. More and more we actually can see the brain as it
learns. We know now, more than ever, that no two brains process
information or store data in the same way. With this neurobiological
view increasingly available, we also are newly aware that the brain
itself is an incredibly sophisticated, complex information processor,
"easily the most sophisticated information transfer system on Earth."

Recently I attended a conference on designing instruction based on new
understandings of the brain, and an educator in the audience raised a
question: Based on how the brain learns, does a whole-language
(constructivist) or a phonics-based program better support literacy in
young learners? The conference presenters paused and then said they
couldn't answer the question because, they emphasized, brains are too
complex to think about in this way -- they learn neither top down or
bottom up, but process information simultaneously from both directions
-- and no brains process information exactly the same way. A silence
fell in the audience after this answer, as it underscored a central
emphasis of the conference presentations -- that one (or two)
approaches to learning really don't meet the needs of students anymore,
and that conceiving of learning as "top down or bottom up" also isn't
really useful. In fact, as the question revealed, we don't even have
accurate physical models or metaphors for imagining learning -- we are
hampered by the crudity of our conceptual models. The question and
answer underscored the ways in which we have to reconceptualize how
we conceive of learning based on how we are coming to understand the
brain. As educators we are engaged in a revolution in how we think
about teaming, and we are only beginning to work out classroom and
instructional technologies that respond to learner diversity.

While this is not primarily a book about the neurobiology of learning,
some critical new findings are important for educators to understand,
based on some of the work being done by individuals like Anne Meyer and
David Rose, cognitive researchers and designers of learning principles
and technologies that tap the capacities of new media to create more
effective teaching and assessment practices in the classroom. In an
early paper Rose and Meyer, cofounders of the Center for Applied
Special Technology in Wakefield, Massachusetts, outlined some
fundamental neuropsychological principles educators need to be aware of
as they plan curriculum and assessment.

Learning in
the brain is highly modularized. We learn about the color of an object
in a different part of the brain than where we learn about its shape.
The brain processes the word cat in a different region when the word is
presented in print than when it is presented in speech, or when it is
composing the word for speaking. The brain has lots of distributed
modules that work in parallel, each with highly specialized learning
functions.

The pattern of
activity varies depending on the task. When we listen to a speech, a
different part of our brain is activated than when we listen to a
symphony. The brain has a "signature" activity that corresponds to the
task it is performing.

The
distribution for the task varies across individuals. Each individual
has a particular "map" of activity: The brain activity of a person who
has perfect pitch looks different from that of someone with normal
pitch, or someone who is tone deaf. As John Medina says, "No two
people's brains store the same information in the same way in the same
place."

The maps
change as we learn. Novices use their brains differently from experts.
The size of individual processing modules can grow and shrink based on
experience, even in adults, so the brain is constantly adapting and
reconfiguring itself based on experience and environment.

Thus we know now
that learning is not a generalized capacity, but lots of different
modules, processes, and individual maps that change over time.
Individual brains differ in many of their specific abilities, and these
abilities change over time -- our brains "sculpt" themselves in
relation to the needs and demands of our environments in astonishingly
complex ways.

From our increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the way the brain
operates when it is learning, and the way it is changed by the act of
learning, we also are beginning to understand that there is no one type
of learner, but a great variety of learners. As Rose and Meyer point
out, individuals who are "learning disabled" in a print-based
environment may not be in a video- or audio-based environment. Making
video- or audio-based learning opportunities more available allows
educators to notice the unusual strengths of children: the visual
memory of an autistic child or the capacity to recognize facial
expressions among aphasics. "Given these data," says researcher John
Medina, "Does it make any sense to have school systems that expect
every brain to learn like every other? . . . The current system is
founded on a series of expectations that certain learning goals should
be achieved by a certain age. Yet there is no reason to suspect that
the brain pays attention to those expectations. Students of the same
age show a great deal of intellectual variability. . . . For
example about 10 percent of students do not have brains sufficiently
wired to read at the age at which we expect them to read. Lockstep
models based simply on age are guaranteed to create a counterproductive
mismatch to brain biology."

These new data have powerful implications for how we should conceive of
instruction and how we think about "disability" in learning. "Co-
locating" the disability of the learner with the environment is
increasingly helpful in conceiving of how to meet the needs of
individual learners -- asking ourselves how the environment in which we
are creating instruction can or cannot meet the needs of the learners
in question (Is the learner disabled, or is it the school?). Thus it is
clear that our whole system of conceiving of instruction and curriculum
design requires dramatic paradigm shifts. While there is wonderful work
afoot on this front, most of it has emerged out of experiences with
pupils traditionally labeled learning disabled. This new research is
not necessarily translating very effectively into "regular" classroom
instruction. Thus our wounded schools struggle along, trying to keep
pace with new brain research and the increasingly sophisticated data on
how learning occurs. Once again, as many of these new understandings of
the brain are operationalized and more fully understood, it is not
clear
that the old-fashioned classroom model can accommodate these new ideas
and knowledge. Again, John Medina notes that, "If you wanted to create
an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain
was
good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom."

The above is an excerpt from the book Wounded
by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and
Standing Up to Old School Culture
by Kirsten Olson. The above excerpt is a
digitally scanned
reproduction of
text from print. Although this
excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the
scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.